Blood on the Water Read online

  Camborne blinked. “The ship was blown up. I believe you saw it yourself. Scores of men and women were drowned. There is no possible argument that that happened, and that it was deliberate mass murder.” He enunciated the words carefully. “Beshara was closely involved. We don’t know how he escaped before the explosion, but he was on the ship beforehand, and he survived. Presumably he managed to get off when they were close enough to the shore around the Isle of Dogs. It seems the clearest explanation. We may never know exactly, and it doesn’t matter. It would be very satisfactory if we could find and prove who helped him. That may be what is in the minds of the authorities who commuted his sentence.” He smiled bleakly, with little more than a baring of the teeth. “When he gets ill enough, and frightened enough, he may decide that silence is not his best choice.”

  “By which time I imagine his coconspirators will be a thousand miles away,” Monk responded drily. “Unless, of course, he has nothing to do with the sinking, but just happens to be Egyptian.”

  “For a man who has spent so many years in the police, you are astoundingly naïve,” Camborne said coldly. “I had heard that you had a reputation for being reasonably astute, even ruthless. I can’t imagine how you got it.” Again he leaned forward over the piles of paper on the desk. “Leave it alone, man! Stick to the crimes you understand and the criminals you can catch. If you interfere you may do far more damage than you can begin to understand.”

  Monk considered confronting him and asking if that was a threat. However, he thought he saw a flicker of fear as well as anger in Camborne’s eyes, and that was a far greater warning than anything the man could have said.

  There was a heavy silence in the room. Footsteps passed in the corridor outside.

  Slowly Monk rose to his feet. Camborne did not; he merely craned his neck and stared upward.

  “Do you really believe Beshara is guilty?” Monk asked.

  “Yes, I do.” There was no hesitation in Camborne, only a flat, evasive anger.

  “Alone? Or with others?”

  “With others,” Camborne replied. “But he escaped the explosion. Perhaps they were not so lucky. Or again, perhaps he did not mean them to be? Had you thought of that?”

  “There’s a lot to think about,” Monk said with a tight smile. He now thought of Camborne not as an ally at all, but as a possible conspirator himself—by his silence, if nothing more. “Thank you for your time,” he added, and went to the door as Camborne declined to reply.

  MONK FOUND JUNIVER ALMOST as soon as the court had adjourned. He fell in step behind him on the pavement as he left the Old Bailey.

  Juniver looked unhappy. “Miserable business,” he commiserated. “But I don’t know how I can help.” He drew in breath as if to add something, then changed his mind and continued walking briskly to the intersection. They crossed Ludgate Hill and went into one of the small alleys toward a quiet little pub.

  Monk kept pace with him all the way to the door. Inside, when Juniver ordered food, Monk ordered some as well.

  “All right,” Juniver said wearily, pushing his way through the throng with Monk on his heels. “What is it you think I can tell you? I represented Beshara as far as the law allows. There was nothing more that I could have done for him. I certainly did not know any of the evidence you’ve since brought to light to cast doubt on the eyewitness identifications.”

  “Interesting choice of words,” Monk observed.

  “What, ‘cast doubt on’?” Juniver said skeptically. “That’s what it is, isn’t it? Doubt? Would you prefer me to add ‘reasonable’?”

  Monk smiled. “The words I was thinking of were that you ‘represented Beshara, as far as the law allows.’ I think the usual phrase is ‘to the best of my ability.’ Was it to the best of your ability? Or did you avoid that phrase because it would not have been strictly true?”

  Juniver winced.

  “The man was guilty, Monk—if not of actually placing the explosives on the Princess Mary, then of obtaining them, or hiring those who did, and probably of helping them escape as well. He was up to his eyes in intrigue of one sort or another. He hated Britain, and everything we’ve done, from raiding Egyptian antiquities to dominating the sea lanes around Africa, and anything else you can think of that’s profitable. We’re arrogant and show off the fact that many of us think we rule the earth by some kind of divine right.”

  Monk regarded Juniver with greatly increased interest. He had previously seen him as a good lawyer, and possibly ambitious, but curbed by both discipline and honor from exceeding what he perceived to be justice. Now it seemed as if he had an emotional involvement in politics and the ambivalent values of patriotism. Monk wondered what bigotry and greed lay behind the claim of love for a narrow group, be it family or country. What was it acceptable to buy at the expense of others? Loyalty to one’s own country above everything? “My family before all others”? How far was that from “me first”? “You can have only what I don’t want, or can’t hold”? “Might is right”? “Duty is only whatever I say it is”?

  The other hurried diners chattered around them, oblivious of their isolated intensity.

  Juniver looked at Monk with curiosity also. He had clearly expected an immediate answer: probably one of anger, even an accusation of disloyalty.

  “You disliked the man,” Monk said thoughtfully. “Yet you could see very clearly why he might hate Britain from the various examples of arrogance we have exercised in pretty well all corners of the globe. You defended him because it was your job, but only as far as the law required, because you found the offense with which he was charged to be abominable.”

  “Fair,” Juniver replied wryly. “But incomplete. I also honestly believed the man to be guilty.”

  “Morally if not legally,” Monk pointed out.

  “A distinction without a difference,” Juniver replied. “The law is rather often an inexact art.” He smiled bleakly and ate a slice of his cold pork pie.

  Monk ate also. There was more to Juniver’s actions than he had admitted. There was a discomfort in the man as if some internal conflict had been reawakened.

  “Camborne said there were fortunes to be made and lost,” he said. Monk was aware as he did so that perhaps he was taking too much of a risk in revealing this. He had no idea of Juniver’s deeper loyalties. Perhaps he should have investigated the lawyers concerned as well as the facts of the case regarding Habib Beshara. Was Beshara not a prime mover at all, but possibly just a pawn?

  Suddenly the cold game pie in its rich pastry lost its flavor. He could have been eating cold porridge. Camborne’s advice not to probe too deeply would be cowardly to follow, but perhaps wise.

  Juniver put down his knife and fork and leaned forward a little. “Camborne would say that,” he replied very quietly. “He has to. He’s a decent enough man, or he used to be, if a bit pedestrian. His wife is very handsome, but more importantly, heiress to a great deal of money.”

  “In shipping?” Monk asked.

  But Juniver did not add any more. He was unhappy to have said even as much. It sat like a mask of embarrassment on his face, and Monk liked him for that. It was not envy when he spoke of Camborne, but pity for a certain kind of captivity.

  “So both Camborne and Beshara are pawns in the game?” he said, picking up his own fork again.

  “Willing pawns,” Juniver replied. “Both could have chosen otherwise, even if at a certain cost.”

  “In order to pay a high price for freedom you have to be aware that you are not free,” Monk pointed out. “Sometimes that knowledge comes too late.”

  “For trapped animals, yes,” Juniver agreed with a touch of bitterness. “But if you’d met Beshara before the trial, you would believe as I do, that he was perfectly willing. And you would have disliked him as much as I did, and been quite aware of it, and the reasons. I believe he knew what was going to happen to the Princess Mary, and was perfectly willing that it should.”

  “That is a sin,” Monk agreed. “B
ut it is not a crime. I dare say many of those with shares in the Suez Canal were quite aware of how many people were going to die needlessly in the digging of it, and yet they do not protest.”

  Juniver drew in his breath, and let it out again. He too appeared to have lost an appetite for his meal. “There’s nothing useful I can tell you, Monk. I couldn’t prove anyone else guilty because there was no one else involved that I could point to. I didn’t have the evidence you dug up to prove Beshara was in the wrong place. All I could do was try to raise reasonable doubt. That was pretty well doomed from the start, because of the horror of the crime. Most of our eyewitnesses couldn’t tell one middle-aged Egyptian from another. But far more importantly than that, they didn’t want to.”

  He took a sip of his ale and set the tankard down again, shaking his head as if he could loosen the grip of memory.

  “They were horrified, grief-stricken, and quite honestly afraid of being blamed for disloyalty, cowardice, even sympathy, with the enemy, if they didn’t stick to the testimony they’d given in the first place—in the heat of the moment. The more I pushed them, the more threatened they felt, and the more they clung to what they’d said. No one wants to be accused by his neighbors of being an apologist for the man who sank the Princess Mary!”

  Monk made no reply. Juniver was right. By the time of the trial they had all entrenched themselves so deeply they could not move. They would be destroyed before they could recant willingly. Honest men, frightened, grieved, confused by hatred they could not possibly understand.

  Monk finished his ale and set the tankard down.

  “Thank you. I wish I didn’t have to prove them wrong, but someone else is guilty of this crime, far more than Habib Beshara.”

  THE FOLLOWING DAY MONK was sent for again by Lord Ossett. He took the long hansom ride without pleasure, in spite of the sunlit streets, and the sight of the open carriages containing ladies in gaily colored dresses, drawn by horses whose harness brasses gleamed and winked in the sun.

  He went up the steps and into the government buildings’ shade with no sense of relief from either heat or noise. He did not have anything to report that was worth Ossett’s time, or his own. All he knew was a mass of details, many of which conflicted with each other. He had little choice but to tell Ossett as much.

  Ossett looked tired. The lines around his eyes and mouth were more deeply etched and there was pallor to his skin. He nodded slowly. “I am very much afraid that the whole issue is now so clouded with irrelevant evidence that there is little chance of learning the truth, far less proving it,” he said unhappily. “I had hoped that you might turn up something unexpected, but I admit that that is unlikely. I think I have too often been overoptimistic.”

  “In all that I’ve found,” Monk replied, “there is nothing that would stand up in court to implicate anyone. The only certainty is that Beshara’s conviction is unsafe. There is no doubt of that.”

  Ossett considered for several moments before replying, as if he might still find some thought to grasp on to.

  “Then if we can find nothing at all,” he said finally, “even to prove him a conspirator, we shall be obliged to let him go.” He regarded Monk intensely. His eyes were shadowed, and the small muscles in his jaw tight. The depth of emotion in him was palpable.

  “I haven’t given up,” Monk said quickly, then wished he had not. He felt obliged to add the only piece of evidence he had not yet mentioned. “I recall seeing a man jump off the Princess Mary moments before the explosion …”

  “Before?” Ossett said quickly. “Are you absolutely certain he went before?”

  “Yes. There was a ferry within yards of where he went in. They pulled him out straightaway.”

  “Good man,” Ossett said absentmindedly, not as if he did not believe it, but as if it were now irrelevant. And perhaps it was. “What do you plan to do to find this man … assuming he survived? He may have been injured, or died from swallowing river water.”

  That was the question Monk had been dreading. He had no answer that satisfied him, but silence would not do. Ossett needed and deserved more than that.

  “I know. We are looking for him, but as you say, he may not have survived. We are comparing all the witness statements and finding the differences to see if they matter,” he answered. “We are also speaking to a few people who saw a great deal but were not questioned the first time. It was an inconsistency in connection with another case that proved a key eyewitness was not where he said he was when he supposedly spotted Beshara. And his guilt depended almost entirely on the testimony of eyewitnesses. If they were mistaken then the rest was irrelevant.”

  “Yes … yes, I am aware of that,” Ossett said very quietly. The acknowledgment was clearly painful to him. Monk wondered how much he knew that he was not free to say. Who else was involved, perhaps innocently? Who else did he wish to protect, or maybe had no choice? What edifice might collapse, crushing the people who relied on it, were stones from the foundation to be removed?

  “It is an impossible situation,” Ossett went on. “What else is there, but what your own eyes tell you? But clearly even the most honest people, when terrified and bereaved, can make mistakes, or become uncertain afterward.” He folded his hands across his stomach. “Be careful, Monk. The newspapers are making a very large issue of this. And—as I dare say you will have noticed—they are angry that we have not yet found all those to blame, but very few have much sympathy with Beshara. He’s a nasty piece of work, whether he is guilty of this particular crime, or not.”

  Monk understood exactly what Ossett was saying and agreed with him. It was Ossett’s reasons that troubled him. Was he offering advice for Monk’s own sake, as if perhaps Monk might not have thought of such things? Was it an attempt at commiseration for the difficulties Monk now faced? Or was it as Monk feared: a very skillfully phrased warning not to question too far into a matter which, for all its violence and grief, was still better left undisturbed?

  Under his mask of office, Ossett was as tense as a dog on guard, the emotion barely held within him. Was his fear general, amorphous, or hideously specific? Further violence? Even worse, miscarriage of justice? Diplomatic crises to do with blame for the atrocity? With whom? The French? Did it really have anything to do with the Suez Canal, or was that a distraction from the reality?

  “Monk!” Ossett’s voice cut sharply across his distraction.

  “Yes, sir,” Monk said quickly. “I appreciate that the eyewitnesses were men recounting in some distress what they recollected, and in many cases wishing desperately to be of any assistance at all. This case might be larger than any other, but it is not different except in scale. Either we want to have as much of the truth as we can find, and act only in accordance with it; or we are willing to blame anyone, and probably hang them, regardless if they are guilty or not. And, of course, consequently allow the real guilty parties to escape. If the latter is the case, then I need it in writing, or I may very well find myself charged with being an accessory.”

  Suddenly Ossett lost the control he had been guarding since Monk had come in. The veneer over his pain was as thin as a coat of varnish.

  “Don’t be a damn fool, man!” His voice creaked with emotion. “If you can’t act in the best interests of your country without some idiotic and totally impossible written permission, which would excuse anything you choose to do, even murder and treason, then you are not fit for a reasonable position of any kind, let alone the one you hold—at Her Majesty’s pleasure, I might add! In fact you are not even fit to be called a loyal subject.”

  It looked like rage in his face, close to hysteria, but Monk knew now that it was fear. What could a man of Lord Ossett’s power and influence be so deeply afraid of?

  “I am loyal to Her Majesty,” Monk said quietly. “My only higher loyalty is to the honor of justice and the law. At least I believe it is. I have never before been in a position where I perceived them not to be the same.”

  The color bled from Os
sett’s face. For several seconds he said nothing, and then he spoke slowly, choosing each word.

  “You misunderstand me. Perhaps I was not clear.” He swallowed. “There are aspects of this case that you are unaware of, and will remain so, for reasons that should not need explaining to you.” He pushed a lock of hair back off his brow. “It is distressing, profoundly so, and I apologize for my loss of temper. This whole matter is abnormal to me. The crime was horrific, and therefore acutely sensitive in public opinion. I made an error in giving it to the Metropolitan Police. I appreciate that now, and you have my apologies. You are now handed back a case that is far more difficult to solve than it would have been in the beginning. The waters have been muddied, perhaps hopelessly. It is a matter not only for detection but for delicacy and discretion.”

  Ossett hesitated, still finding his thoughts slowly, as if treading on ice already cracking beneath his feet.

  “It may be necessary to admit defeat, but it will leave a highly dissatisfied public, no longer believing in the power or the skill of their police force. That is a result I profoundly desire to avoid. Lies are difficult, dangerous, and usually immoral. But the truth is not always the answer either. There may be a fire in a theater, but to shout it out is still dangerous, even fatal. I’m sure you take my point without the necessity of elaboration.”

  Monk was startled by the wave of pity he felt for the man. “Yes, sir. I understand, and I will make certain that my men do also. It is not yet impossible that we will find whoever is guilty, and it may include Habib Beshara as an accessory.”

  Ossett smiled bleakly, the anger had melted away.

  “That would be the best answer imaginable,” he said with a faint smile. “If I can be of assistance in any way at all, ask me. Regardless, keep me informed. That is an order.” He kept his eyes, tense and dark with misgiving, on Monk’s to assure himself that Monk had understood.

  “Yes, sir.” Monk rose to his feet and excused himself.